Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “I had a personal experience sometime between 2000 to 2003, in the woods in the Florida panhandle. I’ve spent some time in the woods since I was a teenager, I’m not a die-hard survivalist but I am familiar and comfortable enough in the woods. I’ve hunted, fished, camped and hiked. I’ve told other people I know, who have spent a lot of time in the woods most of their lives about my experience and asked their thoughts and they say they don’t have an explanation, so to this day I still don’t know what I experienced.

Here’s my experience:

I used to be a leader in a boys group at my old church and we would take the boys camping at least a couple times a year. One time, it would have been fall/winter time, between 2000 to 2003, we went to Florida Caverns State Park in Marianna, Florida. It’s a neat place, you can take tours of the caverns when they’re not flooded, it has walking trails, a gift shop, neat place. We had reserved a primitive camp spot, so we toured during the day and the park locked us in at night. Us adults split the group up and took them on different hiking trails that night, around 8 or 8:30. Myself and another leader took a group of around 12 boys on the upper trail, which runs on top of the caverns, it just makes a big loop around back to starting point. The boys ranged in age between around 6 and 9. I remember the moon was bright enough that we really didn’t need our flashlights, but try keeping boys from using theirs. The park had clear cut the trees along the trail probably 60-70 yards back. As we were walking along, me in front, other leader in back, boys in between, we kept trying to get the boys to keep their flashlights off.

We finally managed to accomplish that for a couple minutes and that is when a strange thing happened. As we were walking along the trail, and let me say this, it was a very well used trail that was walked every day by many visitors, so not a lot of leaves or sticks on it, we started hearing footsteps off the trail out in the clear cut section to our right. We all heard it, we all stopped and turned out lights on in that direction. At first I just thought it was an animal crunching around but we didn’t see anything, no figure, no animal or human, nothing. We started walking again and it started walking again, it was keeping step with us, maybe a second behind our footsteps. When we would stop, you would catch it’s last footstep and it would stop, when we started walking, it would start walking again. We kept shining our lights out in the area, and I mean all 14 flashlights in the same direction, we never saw anything, just heard the footsteps like it was stalking us. I kind of was trying to speed up the group to get down the trail and back to camp but then we came to a spot on the trail that the trail narrowed and there was tall grass on either side of the trail and the trees were much closer to the trail. You know, there’s just that 6th sense that you get that something just isn’t right, that was my feeling and I was responsible for those boys and I wasn’t taking them thru the thick tall grass. I turned the group around and with me in the back now we went back the way we came. At the point we turned around the footsteps stopped. We didn’t hear them on the way back, the woods were just normal. That was just a strange experience that to this day I still don’t have any answers for.”